Quill pig is another name for a porcupine. Porcupines are unattractive and unpopular, but, as animals go, and unlike eagles, elephants, and donkeys, they are reasonably harmless good neighbors that mind their own business. Here's where we can talk about being good neighbors and why it's eternally important.

Monday, May 2, 2011

Lords of the Earth

One of the books that inspired me before we went to Papua New Guinea (and later made me realize how easy we had it compared to true pioneer missionaries) was Don Richardson's Lords of the Earth, the story of how a stone-age tribe in western New Guinea's was first contact with the gospel. The book's timeline began months or years before contact with a scene designed to make Western Christians gag at the tribesmen's barbarity and appreciate the sacrifice and risk of those heroic missionaries who went to evangelize them.

Male Yawi, who considered themselves the lords of the whole earth, hence the book's title, were clad only in penis gourds, and their greeting was to click the gourd with their fingernail and say, "I like your feces."

But, as Dr. Seuss would say, that's not all—oh no, that is not all. They tossed a young girl over a cataract for some minor religious offense, and they summarily executed a prisoner of war—considering it an act of mercy, mind you—by crushing the man's head with a stone. Oh, how those nasty Yawi needed the Gospel!

Well, let's move to thirty years or so after the events Richardson describes, when Mother Teresa was the featured speaker at a prayer breakfast in Washington DC. I haven't been able to confirm any of this, but my conservative source at the time told me that when she had her full rhetorical momentum up, she looked that low-life skunk Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, in the eye and said, "When a society kills its own children [referring to abortion, the one freedom Mr. Clinton ever defended], there is nothing left of it worth saving." Take that, you leftist sicko!

Well, as we know, once Bubba was out of the White House, there was suddenly a whole lot worth saving. Mr. Clinton's successor didn't deny the abortionist crowd a dime of federal tax money, let alone do anything to make it possible for states, counties, or municipalities to make the practice illegal, but by God, when the Twin Towers went down, he could do no wrong, and nothing—no budget constraints, no constitutional rights of US citizens at home, not even human decency—could stand in the way of "bringing Osama bin Laden to justice."

Well, ding dong, the witch is dead. He's gone where the goblins go, below. Yo-ho! "Some people deserve a headshot, he was one of them."

I've already compared 9/11 to Uncle Sam's subsequent predations and so Osama to our current president. Let me also remind you that Lincoln killed a hundred times that many people he considered citizens of the nation over which he presided, Roosevelt killed far more innocent civilians by carpet-bombing Germany, and Truman killed far more by nuking Japan, and Nixon and Johnson killed more in Vietnam (for what Robert McNamara, the architect of that war confessed was a lie), all much more than died on 9/11. When it comes to killing innocent people, Osama, even if guilty of 9/11, was a piker. We name bridges and high schools after people with far more innocent blood on their hands.

I learned recently that the birth defect rate in Fallujah is now 80 percent. It's so bad that the Iraqi health ministry has told the people to stop having children. If they don't have children, who will take care of them in their old age? Not a problem! The cancer rate in Fallujah is like it was in the areas that were downwind from Chernobyl. They'll die before they get old.

If that isn't genocide, what is?

And remember, our brave men and women leveled Fallujah, a city the size of double-A baseball towns in the US, because a few people mutilated the corpses of mercenary soldiers in Uncle Sam's employ. They didn't torture living beings; they mistreated corpses, dead tissue. Which cities in the US should be leveled in retaliation for US soldiers' mistreatment of Afghan corpses?

Well, Osama was still worthy of death, right?

Was he even guilty of 9/11? I wrote in the above-linked post that he didn't act like one would expect the mastermind of 9/11 to act. Over the last decade we've gotten blurry pictures, and cassette and video tapes (in the age of camera phones and Skype?) that government experts—employees of the same government that couldn't predict the dot-com bubble, couldn't predict 9/11, couldn't predict the housing bubble, and isn't predicting a college loan bubble, and meanwhile has wiped out the savings of thrifty subjects to bail out the richest people the world has ever seen—tell us "could very well be" Osama. But where was his Lord Haw-Haw or Tokyo Rose? Where was his cult of personality? Again, compared to the Clintons, the Bushes, and Obama, he was a piker.

And, of course, now that he has no opportunity to face his accusers, we will never know what he knew about 9/11 beforehand. He joins the six million Jews tried in the media and summarily executed by Hitler. Just another Untermann.

Who has benefited from 9/11? Did the Iraqis? Did Saddam? Did the Afghans? Did the Taliban? For that matter, did al-Qaeda? Again, read the fatwa. What were his gripes? Did 9/11 get the US out of the Middle East? Did it get the US to stop killing innocents there? Did he get anything he wanted? So if he was so wrong about the consequences, how could he have been smart enough to pull it off? (Best answer if he's guilty: the world's most expensive, intrusive, and vicious intelligence and military machine is also totally incompetent.)

If he was such a "mastermind" that he could hit three of US fascism's most important buildings, is it reasonable to ask what he thought the US government's reaction would be? Did he expect Uncle Sam to say, "Oh, golly, this is nasty. Let's cut and run"? Or is it more likely that he would remember that the same Madeleine Albright who told the world that it was "worth it" to kill half a million civilians in a vain attempt to get them to rise up against Saddam had also asked, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about, if we can't use it?"

And isn't it even more likely that the neoconservatives, like the Project for a New American Century, Keynesians who believe that war is good for the economy, as proven by World War II, which got the US out of the Great Depression, and who were saying for years before 9/11 that all that was needed to bring about the new world order they envisioned was "another Pearl Harbor," had at least a hand in the affair? They have certainly benefited, and they seem to be the only ones; literally everyone else, from formerly oppressed but now dead Iraqis and Afghans to US taxpayers, is footing the bill, with no end in sight.

There are plenty of fingerprints on 9/11, but I wouldn't bet they're Osama's.

One of my coworkers, a twenty-something, a literature major no less, paid a fellow musician a compliment the other day by saying, "He's the shit." All she's missing to be a good Yawi is a penis gourd. (Actually, I'm being unfair. She is the only one of my coworkers who has spoken out against the wars. But like a good Yawi, she uses feces as a compliment.)

We US citizens are now the lords of the earth. Our last enemy has now been vanquished. (The fans at the Phillies game last night erupted into chants of "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the news.) We can engage in genocide with no one to stop us. We can now execute people without anything more than a trial by the media. And you, dear reader, could be next.